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Bush and Gore See Ruling As Prod for New Controls

Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, who both employ senior advisers with close ties to the tobacco industry, said today that the Supreme Court ruling on cigarette regulation should spur Congress to enact stricter controls on tobacco products.

Mr. Gore, speaking to a community group in Manhattan this afternoon, said Congress should give the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate nicotine as an addictive drug. He accused Republican leaders of stalling on tobacco legislation.

Mr. Bush, in a statement issued by his campaign headquarters, called on Congress and state legislatures to pass laws to restrict access to tobacco by minors. Texas, he said, had already passed some of the toughest such laws in the nation.

Mr. Bush did not address the question that faced the Supreme Court today, whether the F.D.A. should be empowered to regulate tobacco as a harmful and addictive drug. A spokeswoman said the governor had never answered that question and was not prepared to do so today.

Both candidates have ambiguous relationships with the tobacco industry. Mr. Gore's top media adviser, Carter Eskew, helped create the cigarette makers' $40 million campaign to defeat tobacco legislation in 1998.

Mr. Bush's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove, helped draft a poll financed by cigarette companies devised to thwart a lawsuit against the industry by the State of Texas. Mr. Rove at the time was paid $3,000 a month as a consultant to Philip Morris, the country's biggest cigarette maker. The lawsuit was filed in 1996 by Dan Morales, a Democrat, who was the state's attorney general. The cigarette companies eventually settled the suit for $17.3 billion.

Mr. Gore, who has become a passionate opponent of the tobacco industry, once bragged of working in the tobacco fields on his family's farm in Tennessee and until 1990 accepted campaign contributions from tobacco interests. Speaking at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, he moved many with an account of the death of his sister, Nancy Gore Hunger, from smoking-related lung cancer at the age of 46.

Today Mr. Gore accused the cigarette companies of actively recruiting teenagers as ''replacement smokers'' for the 400,000 people who die each year of smoking-related illnesses.

The Bush statement said the governor ''believes Congress should pass tough laws to keep tobacco out of the hands of kids similar to strict anti-teen smoking laws he advocated and signed in Texas.''

Texas imposes fines on retailers who sell cigarettes to minors, prohibits cigarette vending machines in areas accessible to children and restricts tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and churches.